Science Fair Projects

[rainbowmama]

I have an upper elementary school aged kid who is participating in a science fair. My kid designed an experiment loosely from a suggestion she found in a book. I'm pretty sure this book is not designed for families using well water, and I don't think her experiment will work unless she treats the water. This is our first science fair, though, and I'm not sure how appropriate it is for me to tell her how to redesign her experiment to account for the hard water. So, do I leave it alone and hope she figures it out? Or should I tell her?

[HomeAgain]

Can she set up two experiments, one with well water and one with bottled water?

[vonfirmath]

Sometimes experiments don't work.  I try to let my kid make their own decisions. But I will lay out information that might be helpful. Either by directing him to resources with it in it or mentioning things like "there are different types of water out there" that they may not even be aware of. You open the faucet at home and water comes out. You open the faucet at other buildings and water comes out. Etc  Where that water comes from is pretty hidden.

 

Last year, my son made a homemade battery to find out how different numbers of layers would change the current's power (? Not the correct word) going through it.  It really didn't work -- he got results, but too much variation and he couldn't make any conclusions other than explain why it didn't work and what he should do in the future to fix it (try to figure out a way to make the materials more consistent -- not something we could do in the time left)  He got an A despite the project not really working.

 

This year he made a pendulum.  We had problems along the way that were not anticipated and had to be solved.He came up with ideas of how to solve them and then we helped him find the material and implement the ideas.  So we came up with better results -- but still a long list of how the experiment could be done better.  But I think its pretty good for a 5th grade level of experiment.

[Clemsondana]

I would definitely be OK with pointing out information that a kid wouldn't be expected to know. So, discussing differences in water would seem appropriate. Your student can do a quick search to find out differences between bottled, well, and city water and include that as part of the introduction. Then the student would either explain why they chose the type of water that was used, or water could become an additional variable, so that the rest of the experiment is done in duplicate. While the point of the science fair project is for kids to design and experiment, even in academic research environments it's typical for people to throw out 'have you thought about how X would affect it?' questions during the planning stages.

[Farrar]

Unless the point of the fair is specifically to do absolutely everything without adult involvement at all, I'd absolutely tell her. Why withhold basic information that you know about the circumstances of your home that the book doesn't?

 

I get that there's a line somewhere between doing your kid's work and letting them learn on their own from their own mistakes, and science fair projects are seriously a prime example hot button for this sort of thing because they're a notorious place that overinvolved parents do the work on behalf of the kid, but making a few gentle suggestions or doing things like taking photos of her doing the experiment or helping clamp or carry something heavy or anything like that is totally appropriate - again, assuming there aren't really strict rules about this in place.

 

In general, I think any time a kid is going to learn more if you step in than if you don't, then it's better if you can step in a little. If she does the experiment and it doesn't work because of the well water, then there's a good chance she won't learn anything beyond "sometimes experiments don't work." Okay, a good lesson, but if she didn't think or know about the well water to start, she may not figure it out then either. If you want her to learn from the experiment itself, then saying, hey, remember we have well water and it might mess with this is going to allow her to do that.